sending this both to u and joey but i guess my questions are, what (if any) are the narrative purposes of the kris and weird route csa theming and why would toby add that, what is he trying to say? ive thought about how its being portrayed a lot but idk what the Point of it all is. idk how to word this in a way that isnt stupid.
hii ^.^ so i can't tell you what toby fox himself intends by anything because the game isn't finished and i do not know the guy but i can tell you what i think. undertale and deltarune are both deeply concerned with children's autonomy. in undertale we have a society that routinely murders lost children in pursuit of freedom for the people left alive to see it. the two characters you can control are young children heavily implied to have been abused prior to falling into the underground. you are given the power to decide whether frisk gets to be a person at all and whether chara can exist outside of the demonic caricature that comes out of the genocide route. you essentially decide whether these children are people. the commentary in undertale regarding player-character autonomy is far less central than it is in deltarune, but what is there is deeply reminiscent of the power adults wield over children. the ability for adults to decide whether or not a child is a complete person is what allows child abuse to happen.
i don't read that with a csa lens for undertale, though. i do think the core concept there is more about the societal abuse of children rather than individualized abuse or specific types of abuse. i don't even think it's really about familial abuse, either, just the inherent mistreatment that children recieve by virtue of living in a society where adults can arbitrarily decide that they are or are not real people depending on the adults' needs. this is relevant to the deltarune question because deltarune is focusing in on very specific things that undertale only alludes to. the player-protagonist dynamic is the most major one of these. since this dynamic is intertwined with the mistreatment of children in undertale, that also recieves greater emphasis and specificity in deltarune. and i think it would be extremely difficult and clunky to avoid allusions to sexual abuse in a narrative centered on children's autonomy.
the csa theming in weird route is, imo, incredibly self-explanatory. i will explain it anyway. the genocide route in undertale is about removing agency from a child and fulfilling another child's revenge fantasy by guiding them towards violence. the goal of the genocide route is to make you feel ashamed for bleeding the game dry to the point where you don't feel sympathy for the characters anymore, don't think of them as real people, and don't have any qualms about hurting them to entertain yourself. the weird route in deltarune has a similar idea attached to it, except it moves down from the societal level of undertale to a much more personal level by making it almost exclusively about kris and noelle. again, in the weird route you remove agency from two children and push them to engage in a violent fantasy that neither would naturally pursue with the player out of the picture. noelle openly expresses masochististic fantasies and an attraction to things that scare her. kris has a history of self-harm and a capacity for cruelty that we don't know the full extent of beyond them being repulsed by it while still being attracted to it to some degree. the weird route forces them both into the most extreme versions of these fantasy roles. kris is accused of enjoying it. noelle thanks them for it.
as i've touched on before, kris is being controlled to some degree by both carol and dess in a way that frequently crosses over into csa-theming territory. in the weird route, kris is given absolute control over noelle, and the control is blatantly romantic/sexual. it's a revenge fantasy again. for both kris and noelle, the weird route is a rape fantasy (or, if we must sanitize things, a violent fantasy), which neither is interested in actually executing, being forced into reality, a place where it doesn't belong. this very easily ties into the overarching themes we have in deltarune already. fantasy and reality and dreams and whether or not something should be real. it's an extension of deltarune's main thesis regarding reality and fantasy & it's the natural progression of the commentary on children's autonomy that began all the way back in undertale and that has been made much more personal and individual in deltarune.
as for kris in general, just take away the fantasy bits i was talking about up there and focus in on the issue of children's autonomy. you are given arbitrary power over a self-harming child who you have the ability to decide is not a real person whenever it's convenient for you. you can make kris do whatever you want and tell yourself they want it too, or that they gave you the option so they must want it, or that they'd surely stop you if they really didn't want to do it. it is very reminiscent of the power that any adult can obtain over a child at any time. their lack of autonomy in relaton to their child status is further emphasized through literal representations of adults exerting absolute control over them, namely carol and dess, and trusted adults ignoring their boundaries and making them physically uncomfortable. the latter applies to literally every single adult in hometown, but it is most obvious with toriel and asgore. and then they also have a history of "doing whatever the big kids asked them to" and a clearly strained relationship with their brother and something weird in their relationship with dess. ultimately, all of this is just to emphasize kris's total lack of control over their life and their body. it reads as csa because it is impossible to write something like this without it reading as csa. i take it as more of a literary device than the very literal sexualization happening in the weird route, but like. as i've explained before. kris totally got molested.
tldr: the csa theming in deltarune is the natural progression of the commentary on children's autonomy that began all the way back in undertale. like most things carried over from undertale into deltarune, it recieves greater emphasis and specificity and becomes more personal. kris's lack of autonomy in all areas of their life is communicated through uncomfortable relationships with adults that reflect sexually abusive dynamics. the weird route is more explicitly sexual because it is dealing with the concept of the underdeveloped rape fantasy from two children who would not pursue it in reality if it wasn't forced upon them. this is the natural progression of deltarune's central themes of fantasy and reality; weird route is a guilty fantasy that was not supposed to become real.
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